Curious about what filesystem people here use to set up shared directories/drives between a dual-boot windows/linux machine. I've always used FAT32, but now with DVD games becoming more popular, Blu-Ray on the rise, rips and files are quickly becoming much greater than the 4GB limit of FAT32. And I hate splitting files. I did find http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2265543,00.asp that article, which provided some useful information. The two things are read/write access from both OS's natively (no 3rd party applications that require me to open them to gain access to the drive.), and larger file support. Of course, free too. That throws out NTFS For Linux. Also, Samba won't work, because I won't be networking the computers, it'll be dual boot. (Unless Samba can do that). So, any suggestions that people here use and like?

Hmm, if it where between a Dual Boot Linux/Windows machine vs a dedicated Linux and a Dedicated Windows machine I would have a recommendation (Samba on the Linux host, Windows Networking on Windows)..

Not too sure on the front of Windows reading a Linux file share; if it where simply READING the files in windows from linux there are a couple of utilities that I've tried, but I've not really found much on writing/purging from the linux share...

Well, after a bit of work, I found two things that work pretty good. Windows has a 3rd party driver to read Ext2 that you can get from http://www.fs-driver.org/ haven't had any problems. Think so, but not sure as I'm writing this, but believe it'll work with ext3 too. It should anyway, as they're pretty much the same thing (just logging added). But it doesn't explicitly say it. This basically just allows windows to read those drives. So there's no opening a separate program, works right in windows explorer. Second, I used the NTFS-3G driver for linux. Requires to have fuse installed. Didn't require anything on my part except to make sure fuse was enabled in my kernel, and in Gentoo to do a emerge ntfs-3g. From there, you just mount the drive as a filesystem as type ntfs-3g. Have done some read-write on it and no problems. I set it up in my fstab, and just changed the 'ntfs' parameter for that drive to 'ntfs-3g'. works like a charm.In the end, I'll probably keep all my shared drives as NTFS. That way if I'm taking my external, i can use it on another person's computer who may not have the ext2 driver installed.Good stuff.